Film Reviews by Steve

Mike Leigh's debut film is a characteristic exploration of the comedy of awkwardness. He received meagre funding from the BFI set aside for experimental cinema. And it was well earned. While this eventually becomes grimly funny, it seems like the intention is to achieve a heightened realism rather than to conventionally entertain. Some scenes are excruciating.

Anne Raitt plays a desperately lonely typist approaching middle age who looks after her sister, who has learning disabilities. Though the carer is profoundly inhibited, it eventually becomes clear that everyone she knows is even more shy and frustrated. Including her colleague, brilliantly performed by Joolia Cappleman, who fills the emptiness with crackpot gimmicks.

The scene when the unloved secretary has a date with an incredibly repressed middle aged teacher is close to being unwatchable. And yet it is uncomfortably funny. Leigh has a rigid technique which enhances the atmosphere of terrible anxiety. Repetitive sounds are amplified until they become irritating. Characters are isolated in wide, empty streets.

The camera tilts, but never tracks or zooms. The characters feel trapped in close up within the static frame. There is no soundtrack, just the ambient noise of a badly played guitar and an out of tune piano. But, we come to care for these people, isolated and tortured by their inability to communicate. There is no politics. Just an overwhelming pity for human sadness.

Maybe purists will be dismayed by Roman Polanski's adaptation of the mythic tragedy of Macbeth, but it shows another way of presenting the plays of William Shakespeare on the big screen. While the text is changed, the celebrated monologues are left intact. New lines are inserted to explain the narrative, so no-one should get lost.

And there is an extraordinary amount of exciting, bloody, brutal action. Medieval Scotland is presented plausibly and in rich detail. And the gloomy atmosphere of the grey skies, the soaking hillside in the constant rain makes the mood dark and oppressive. Weather on screen is rarely compelling as this... Which complements the pessimism of the bard's cycle of ambition and guilt.

The film benefits from casting younger actors in the lead roles. Jon Finch is a charismatic, brooding Macbeth. He actually has a greater rapport with Martin Shaw as Banquo than Francesca Annis playing Lady Macbeth. She is insubstantial, though beautiful. But they are at an age when they might be recklessly driven. And it makes their ruin even more powerful.

The soliloquies are presented as voice-overs, which Finch delivers movingly. It made a huge loss. But for my money, it's the best screen version. While the famous lines are deeply poetic, the film feels persuasively realistic. Every single scene is presented with invigorating imagination. It remains intensely fatalistic, but also rousing, and spectacular.

This big screen version of the legendary BBC sitcom does little to tweak the formula, and is all the better for that. Most of the situations are repeated from the series, and they are still funny. And best of all, the incredible all-time-great tv comedy cast is all present. Their roles are mere caricatures, but the brilliant actors made them all national treasures.

My personal favourite is John Le Mesurier as the effete and ever-so-reasonable Sergeant Wilson. The few alterations are all fine. There is a different location used for Walmington-on-Sea, but it still conveys the impression of an idealised English village. Liz Fraser steps in to play Wilson's lady friend, but she is actually perfect.

It's an origins story of how the Walmington Home Guard came together under the bumptious leadership of Captain Mainwaring (Arthur Lowe). And spread chaos over their corner of the south coast. Until, inevitably they prove themselves against the enemy. Creators Jimmy Perry and David Croft, and the incredible cast had already made three series, and were well drilled... ...

Even if the Home Guard wasn't. By 1971, the British film industry was in decline. Big screen spin offs from tv series were money makers, if unambitious. It was a chance to see popular favourites in widescreen with much bigger budgets. Dad's Army is easily the best of these. Not because of these production values, but because its characters and the ensemble cast are immortal.

This loose adaptation of Muriel Spark's novel- via a stage production- is a satisfying brush with quality. There is an intelligent, witty script, evocative use of Edinburgh locations, a persuasive impression of the 1930s and its fashions, with a large, excellent cast, all stunningly photographed in sumptuous colour.

The film is primarily a vehicle for Maggie Smith's spectacular, charismatic performance in the title role, for which she won the Oscar. And the fascinating character of Miss Jean Brodie dominates the story; a naive schoolteacher in a private school who instills in the girls her own approval of the growing fascism movement in Europe.

And like Mussolini she appeals through emotion and personality rather than truth and egalitarianism. She satisfies her own needs before the wellbeing of her class. Which ultimately leads to tragedy. She is destroyed by one of her most precocious girls, formidably played by Pamela Franklin, who with chilling inevitability assumes the attributes of her mentor.

Robert Stephens is convincing as Jean Brodie's bohemian lover, a mediocre artist and teacher whose elitist sense of entitlement is as prodigious as hers. The awareness of where this authoritarianism is heading makes this an unsettling experience. While there is a compelling study of a misguided woman portrayed by a great actor, it is also a warning from history.

Rambling version of DH Lawrence's modernist novel mainly succeeds thanks to its period production and Glenda Jackson's Oscar winning performance as a sexually emancipated single woman living among the intellectual elite of a mining town after the '14-'18 war. It's handsomely shot around the midlands and the north of England, but its location is vague.

It's a film of ideas, expressed through long conversations about love and sex, work and freedom. It's a period piece, but when the actors are advancing theories on free love, gender roles and communal living it feels like it's more about the late sixties. The trend for Edwardian fashion and beards in the hippie era, and the psychedelic inserts, also suggest this duality.

The two most famous and effective scenes have no dialogue. The naked wrestling between Alan Bates and Oliver Reed in front of a blazing fire. And Jackson channelling her inner psychic bull by chasing a herd of cows across a field. But mostly this is a film of digressive philosophical talk. This is often fascinating, but eventually grows tiresome.

The later scenes in Switzerland are hard work. Ollie gives a strangely stoned performance as Glenda's repressed lover. Bates and Jackson give era defining performances, but are hardly ever on screen together. And if the film remains interesting as an insight into a long ago culture, this is England at the turn of the '70's, rather than after the great war.

Oddball survival adventure which seems to combine the action genre with the theatre of the absurd! The pitch should have been to imagine a novel by Alistair MacLean adapted for the screen by Samuel Beckett. So two handcuffed prisoners in an unnamed country (it was shot in Spain) attempt to escape a military government in the pursuit of an illusory freedom...

... while chased from above by a sinister black helicopter. Actually, there is hardly any exposition at all. This is a head movie and anything resembling a MacGuffin has been stripped out. Essentially, these people are running away because they are running away. The men (Robert Shaw and Malcolm McDowell) have contrasting personalities, but their motives are mysterious.

Shaw gives a charismatic performance, but his character is a cypher. The enemy is menacing, but obscure. The film is about the action, and vaguely about human entrapment. Of course, many will find this pretentious. But those who buy into it may particularly be rewarded by the incredible Spanish landscapes that the fugitives are pinned against.

Howard Hawks eventually decided that a logical plot doesn't matter and punters just want dialogue and action. This takes that premise as far as it can go. And while the lack of motivation makes the film feel empty, that void just deepens the theme of human futility. It is too long, but it is encouraging that such an abstract film got made, and is still watched.

Michael Powell's final release is an adaptation of a banned autobiographical novel by Australian painter/sculptor Norman Lindsay. So it belongs in a group of the director's work about the psychology of the artist. James Mason is a nonconformist, a middle aged bohemian who searches for inspiration in the tropical backwater of the Great Barrier Reef.

He finds his muse in a wild girl who has grown up uneducated on the remote island. She is played by Helen Mirren in her first significant film role. This child of nature is uninhibited and awkward, but when swimming down among the coral and the fish she acquires a primal grace. The story reflects upon their freedom, and how it is compromised.

Like most of Powell's films, there is a strong, spiritual undertow to the flow of the narrative. This one is more comical than most, with some knockabout comedy, including an astonishing performance from Godfrey, the dog. It looks stunning, capturing the exotic grandeur of the Queensland coast, particularly the spectacular underwater photography.

Mason's Aussie accent comes and goes and Mirren doesn't even try. It was a big hit in Australia, but a flop elsewhere, and sadly Powell's final project was for the Children's Film Foundation. But this is a typically offbeat venture from the great director, both personal and magnificent. And it captures a way of living which has been lost.

A boy and his pet film, with a difference. It is a critique of an education system which is complicit in the failure of the child; who will be just another kid sent down the mines. David Bradley plays a lonely, neglected working class kid from a Yorkshire mining town who finds self worth through his relationship with the wild kestrel he raises from a chick.

The teachers do not engage with him. His father has gone and his mother does not love him. But through the falcon he develops a capacity to understand, nurture, and be more fulfilled. This isn't like Disney, where the boy's dreams would come true. He is destroyed by others who are just as damaged as himself. He exists in a hierarchy of bullying.

At the apex is the disinterested headteacher who aimlessly hands out corporal punishment. Or more comically the resentful, intimidating games coach (Brian Glover) who act's like he's Bobby Charlton. Loach shoots this in a social realist style: the cast are amateurs; scenes are improvised in real locations; action is shown in long shots without montage.

This environment is absolutely real and Bradley is enduringly authentic. Sometimes momentum is lost while the director spells out what he presumes is unfamiliar to the audience. But Ken Loach's polemic, adapted from Barry Hines' classroom classic, connected with the British public more than any of his other films.

Funny, flashy relationship drama set in a gorgeous touristic France, which plays out over 12 years. A young, attractive couple meet on the Newhaven-Dieppe ferry, fall in love and marry, then have a daughter, while drifting inexorably apart. This is staged over five driving holidays. Episodes from these are shuffled together so the scenes move freely between each trip.

So experiences from different times of life are contrasted to comical or wistful effect. The dialogue which starts as flirtatious develops an edge. They acquire more money but have less fun. Their passion gets run down. And they have affairs. It's an old sad story.

Albert Finney as the husband is inscrutable, but Audrey Hepburn as his wife is hugely sympathetic and charming. The ostentatious, modernist style which once made it chic is now dated, but it has acquired enormous nostalgic appeal, including the cars and Audrey wears groovy Carnaby Street fashions. And the tourist sites are blissfully uncrowded.

The film ends with a romantic crisis, but it doesn't exhume their disappointments to much depth. Part of the problem is Finney doesn't give the impression he has much to lose. This is a light, entertaining film which is more comical than tragic. There is stylish direction, a clever script and Henry Mancini's lovely easy listening score applies plenty of surface gloss.

This kind of macabre, rural melodrama came to be called folk horror, but it isn't really a scare film at all. It's based on a historic public figure, Matthew Hopkins who ran witch trials during the English Civil War, principally for his own enrichment. It is mostly fictional. There is no supernatural theme. If this is a horror film at all it is because of the grotesque depravity of the period.

Vincent Price plays the witchfinder and he called it his greatest performance. It's still pretty unsubtle, though he does dial down the histrionics. Robert Russell is as effective, as Hopkins' (real life) strongarm John Stearne. Though the protagonist is Ian Ogilvy as a member of Cromwell's army, driven to revenge after the duo murder his father in law and rape his wife.

And he is handsome and virtuous and Price is corrupt and degenerate. As a moral tale, it's uncomplicated. This has become a huge cult item, partly because of the interesting fusion of real history and fantasy, though this is a mix which runs all the way back to Dracula. There is plenty of decadent wickedness. Best of all is the period atmosphere and East Anglian locations.

It's compelling, but the prurient violence makes this feel like a voyeuristic guilty pleasure. It's nowhere near as explicit as a modern horror film, but the cruelty is so creative that it eventually gets to feel unpleasant. This was legalised atrocity. Of course, many go to horror exactly for this. And at least it all ends unfavourably for the bad guys.

Charming coming of age comedy about the sexual experiences and daydreams of a teenage boy in the long summer between school and college, and his search for the ideal girl. This story has been told many times, but there's an artlessness here which is poignant as well as funny. It's a record of a time and a place; the English new towns during the sixties sexual revolution.

Barry Evans lacks charisma as the virgin in need of experience, but maybe that's appropriate. He pursues a variety of contrasting archetypes. My pick is Angela Scoular as a sexually precocious posh girl with emancipated parents. The film often echoes Billy Liar, particularly when Judy Geeson is running through her Julie Christie mannerisms.

It was shot on the streets of Stevenage with Evans on his bike setting out his teenage philosophy on life and love. This may now seem naive but it all adds up to sweet nostalgia. There are inserts of psychedelic montage and a groovy original soundtrack by Spencer Davis Group and Traffic. The girls wear trendy gear from Carnaby Street.

The film is winsome rather than sophisticated, though there is unexpected nudity. Some of the appeal is that it is so British. If this was an American B film in '68, all the kids would be cool and driving cars and tuning in and turning on. But this unpretentious time capsule has an innocence, and is probably nearer the real experiences of sixties teenagers.

Droll British caper which (maybe) features the first cybercrime on film. Peter Ustinov plays a socially awkward computer programmer who has just served time and then fraudulently takes a senior post with a big American corporation. While falling for a lonely secretary (Maggie Smith), he sets about diverting cash into bogus business accounts.

It's one of those London films of the period which opens with a shot of a red bus passing a famous tourist destination. It was made with the American market in mind. Sadly this didn't lead to greater opportunities for Maggie Smith, who is superb. If the British film industry hadn't collapsed around this time, surely she'd have become a huge film star.

And this impression of national malaise is the principal theme of the film. This is a Britain surviving on foreign money, carrying a defunct aristocracy. A country of defecting idealists and the brain drain. What else is an enterprising hacker going to do but but shake the last few coins from the pockets of the body? Which makes the film feel quite contemporary.

But while there's a mood of cynicism, it's still a funny, modest film; and the slight bitterness is sweetened by the optimism of these two isolated people coming together. Ustinov does his usual bumbling schtick, but he and Smith make an adorable couple. And everything turns out for the best in the end, because it's a comedy.

The definitive film version of William Shakespeare's immortal tragedy of doomed young lovers from feuding aristocratic families in Renaissance Verona. It's an abridged adaptation, but faithful in spirit. There is gorgeous set design, and location photography around Tuscany. It all looks far too pristine to be realistic, but still magnificent.

The film is most famous for casting actors closer to the age of the characters in the play than was usual. Juliet is 13 in the text, and Olivia Hussey was 16 during production. Leonard Whiting, playing Romeo, was 17. And while their acting is quite raw- for which director Franco Zeffirelli must take some responsibility- this production is made extraordinary by their performances.

The enchantment of their romantic scenes is thrilling and inspiring, particularly their meeting at the Capulet's masked ball, and of course, the balcony scene. While the subplots involving long scenes of bawdy crosstalk can get tiresome, there is always magic when this Romeo and Juliet are on screen together, accompanied by the lovely, romantic score.

Those indifferent to Shakespeare's poetic verse are unlikely to enjoy this, because although the speeches are edited, there's still plenty of talk. The long sword fighting scenes are well choreographed, though not for everyone. But there is also spectacle, with Oscars for cinematography and costume design. Most of all, it's Leonard and Olivia who breath new life into their 400 year old infatuation.

Absurd but ridiculously entertaining World War II action spectacular. It's one of the many productions of the sixties which took the model of the post war special operations film and then remade it with a huge budget, in colour with a wide screen format. Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood are the stars, but their stunt doubles get more screen time.

And there must be more explosions than in any other film. The two leads break into a German castle fortress in the Alps to free an Allied General and for Burton to deliver a ludicrous plot twist. Then the laconic, unkillable Eastwood basically blasts them back to London. The real purpose of the raid alters about every 15 minutes, but, who cares...

As this is a sequence of stunts and explosions, it might be argued that it should be eclipsed by modern action films with more evolved effects. But it still works. The climax on board a cable car is justly famous. It helps that the stars are legends of the cinema. Mary Ure is sympathetic as an imbedded British spy and Derren Nesbitt reliably odious as a Gestapo officer.

The Austrian locations are a plus, especially the imposing Hohenwarfen Castle. Most of all, the story has unstoppable momentum. There''s a long running time of 160m, but it passes in a flash. It's all extremely improbable, but many special operation missions during WWII really were! Maybe it's a low bar, but it's easily the best screen version of a novel by Alistair MacLean.

For many years, Up the Khyber was rated as the best of the Carry On series. There's a decent location shoot, with Snowdon, Wales standing in for the North West Frontier, Afghanistan, and reasonable production values. The plot is typically absurd, but more robust than usual.

While there's the standard barrage of smutty double entendres, a few still raise a titter and they are not as threadbare as some later entries. The cast of regulars isn't quite at full strength- Kenneth Connor is always missed- but most of the key names are present and Joan Sims is in good form as the vulgar wife of the Governor (Sidney James).

It's a spoof of those historical adventure films about the British in India during the height of the empire. Which would have been fair game to the cast and crew at the time, but now will be problematic to some. So there are silly puns made of Indian names, with Bernard Bresslaw as Bungdit Din. Half of the cast is in brownface.

So what was once the jewel in the crown of the Carry On series, now feels among the most compromised. If all that is set aside... this is genial, unpretentious stuff which really doesn't mean to offend. It seems unlikely that these films are still being watched half a century on. But compared to other lowbrow comedies of the period, this one stands up fairly well.